🔴 UPDATED: 29 July, 2026
Ben Carroll has been sworn in at Government House as Victoria's 50th Premier and used his first day to promise a royal commission into construction sector corruption "as soon as possible", a special prosecutor to work alongside it, and stronger powers for the anti corruption watchdog, while declining to back the 4.5 billion Suburban Rail Loop. The Australian reported the commission's hearings could begin before the November election, raising the prospect that Jacinta Allan could be called to give evidence over her years running the Big Build.
The paper also revealed how close the handover came to collapse: Sonya Kilkenny's nomination carried 15 signatures including Allan's own, lodged after Allan had publicly given Carroll her "unqualified support", and Kilkenny withdrew at 11:55am as part of a deal that gives Allan loyalist Tim Richardson a cabinet position. Gabrielle Williams was elected deputy 45 votes to 23 over Steve Dimopoulos. Bill Shorten said Labor had been facing an "extinction level" result worse than 1992 if it had not changed leaders.
🔴 UPDATED: 12:20pm, 28 July, 2026
Ben Carroll has been unanimously endorsed by the state parliamentary Labor Party as Victoria's next premier, with Gabrielle Williams to serve as deputy premier. "I am delighted to announce that Ben Carroll has been unanimously endorsed by the state parliamentary Labor Party as our next premier," Labor whip Juliana Addison announced outside the party room, paying tribute to Allan as "an extraordinary person who has contributed so much to the Parliament of Victoria". Sonya Kilkenny's challenge ended with her standing aside in the party room, sparing Labor the drawn out membership ballot it feared. Carroll will become Victoria's 50th premier. The two hour caucus meeting was chaotic, News24 reported, with shouts of "sit down please" heard from outside the room and Allan herself heard calling "hang on, hang on, one at a time".
🔴 UPDATED: 12:01pm, 28 July, 2026
Attorney General Sonya Kilkenny has nominated against Ben Carroll for the Labor leadership, blowing up the clean handover and forcing the drawn out contest Allan quit to avoid. News24 reports Gabrielle Williams will serve as interim leader while a ballot of MPs and party members runs, a process that can take six to eight weeks.
🔴 UPDATED: 9:49am, 28 July, 2026
Jacinta Allan has resigned as Victorian Premier, quitting today just 30 minutes before a party room meeting where she would have faced a spill motion, and clearing the way for Deputy Premier Ben Carroll to take the state's top job.
For a full day Allan vowed to fight, daring her party to vote her out. In the end she went before they could, barely four months out from the November state election. Carroll, who declared his challenge on Monday only six weeks after publicly ruling out moving against her, was expected to be elected unopposed. Allan said this morning he would have her "unqualified support".
"It is clear that the premier has lost the majority of our caucus," Carroll said in a statement confirming his challenge. "As such, I have since visited the premier to inform her that I will be nominating for the leadership of the Labor Party."
Only a day earlier, Allan had written to Labor state secretary Steve Staikos formally notifying him of her intention to stand as a candidate if a leadership election was required, a move that threatened to drag the party through a contest of almost two months, because both the Labor caucus and the rank and file membership would have voted. By Tuesday morning that fight was over.
Before that cabinet meeting, a delegation of MPs is understood to have gone to Allan's office to ask her to resign, believed to include Anthony Carbines, Gabrielle Williams, Ingrid Stitt, Luba Grigorovitch and Colin Brooks. Allan said no, and told those ministers they should resign instead.
Allan vowed to fight, then quit before the party room could vote
The collapse was fast. Over the weekend, in her home town of Bendigo, senior Labor figures told the Premier her position could not be guaranteed through to November. She rejected that verdict and dared her opponents to put it to a vote. By Tuesday morning the numbers had become unanswerable.
Some ministers arrived at Monday's cabinet meeting publicly backing her. Asked whether they supported the Premier's refusal to resign, one said simply, "I support the Premier", adding that a meeting had occurred the night before but they did not know who was there or whose views were represented.
Six weeks ago Carroll swore he would not move on Allan
Carroll's move is a sharp reversal. As recently as 15 June he ruled out moving on the Premier. Asked whether he would ask Allan to step aside, he answered "No", and when a reporter challenged him to look her in the eye and say it, he replied that he could. Standing beside Allan that day, having backed her for three years, he went further and invoked his own family.
"I've got a young daughter at home and I couldn't be more proud to make sure she grows up knowing that I supported Jacinta Allan."
Six weeks later, colleagues say repeated requests that he "stand up and give the party its best opportunity" have changed his mind.
One senior Victorian Labor source, quoted by News24's AM Agenda, described the Premier's position as "cooked like a charcoal chicken". The same source said the Deputy Premier was "now actively reconsidering his position after ministerial and backbench colleagues have asked him" to stand.
The polling driving Labor's panic
The trigger for the panic is a set of numbers Labor MPs cannot argue with. A Resolve Political Monitor survey had Liberal leader Jess Wilson well clear as preferred premier on 43%, with Allan back on 24%. With four sitting weeks left before Victorians vote in November, MPs decided they could not carry those figures into a campaign.
Ben Carroll sat around the table for everything Labor is now running from
Carroll is not an outsider riding in to clean up. He's been a minister without a break since 2017, first under Daniel Andrews and then under Allan, and he held Roads and Road Safety from 2020 to 2022 and Public Transport from 2020 to 2023, the years the Big Build ran hottest. Since October 2023 he's been Allan's deputy, bound by cabinet solidarity to defend all of it.
That's the case the Coalition is already making. As one federal MP put it, Carroll "plays an integral role" in the government and changing leaders "isn't going to make any difference". On the Big Build, the cost blowouts and the decisions that drove Labor's numbers into the ground, Carroll owns the same record Allan does. It's the same government and the same policies. Only the jockey has changed.
Carroll's answer to that is a short list of differences: he is understood to favour a royal commission into the Big Build, and has indicated he believes he can settle the pay dispute with public school teachers and rebuild the party's economic credentials.
The Big Build scandal hanging over the whole fight
Whoever comes out on top inherits a government still bleeding from the Big Build scandal. An integrity report into the state's major projects program examined alleged corrupt and criminal conduct on Big Build sites and pointed to about $15 billion in cost blowouts, with warnings that money had flowed to criminal organisations. Allan was referred to IBAC over the program, and as the minister responsible for transport infrastructure during the years in question, she owned it personally. She apologised for the criminal conduct uncovered but ruled out a royal commission, a stance understood to have put her at odds with MPs who believed the scandal could not be contained without one. The Liberals have said they will call one if they win in November.
That split is now out in the open. Environment minister Enver Erdogan, asked on Tuesday morning whether there should be a royal commission into Big Build corruption, answered "Yes", saying there was "a case for change" and the state needed "stronger action on crime and corruption".
Her defenders held the line until it broke
Allan did not lack defenders to the end. Attorney General Sonya Kilkenny said the Premier had her "full support" and dismissed the destabilisation as "idle gossip" that "doesn't help Victorians", who she said were "hurting right now". By Tuesday afternoon Kilkenny had gone from defending Allan to nominating for the leadership herself, against the man Allan endorsed. That morning the loyalists were still holding: energy minister Lily D'Ambrosio said Allan had her full support, and retiring former health minister Mary-Anne Thomas said she would not back a spill because Allan had "served this state with real leadership". Shortly after, the Premier resigned.
Faceless men, an overnight coup and the collapse of the Socialist Left
News24 political reporter Jack Hyhof said the day's real story was the collapse of the Socialist Left, the faction that produced Daniel Andrews and Allan and has governed Victoria since 2014. A senior Labor source told him, before the result was known, that Kilkenny "does not like what just happened", and that the original decision to move on Allan was not made in the Left's caucus room: "Faceless men made the decision."
Kilkenny was reported to have gathered her nominations overnight, a direct strike at the pair News24 described as the architects of the coup: Carroll and his new deputy Gabrielle Williams, who defected from the Left to join him. Hours before the meeting, Kilkenny was still holding the line in public. Asked whether she would support another Left candidate, she said those were "matters for the Parliamentary Labor Party, but I'm here today as a minister of this government, and the premier has my support".
Carroll says he is doing it to stop One Nation
Carroll's justification for the strike is telling. He argued the stakes were too high not to step up, warning that a Labor loss in November would open the door to "a three-way coalition between the Liberals, Nationals and One Nation". The man moving on his own Premier is pitching himself as the last thing standing between a surging One Nation and a seat at the table in Victoria.
A no confidence motion lands tomorrow
The timing could hardly be worse for Labor. Parliament returns on Tuesday, the day after the delegation moved on Allan, and the Liberal opposition will lodge a motion of no confidence in the government. Opposition leader Jess Wilson said she had "no confidence in this Labor government" and invited the Labor MPs "doing the numbers against the Premier" to join the Coalition, vote for the motion and "bring on an early election". Federal Liberal senator James Paterson has argued a change of leader will not revive Labor's chances.
Allan leaves office with Labor trailing badly and its polling collapsing. Carroll takes the job with a unanimous party room behind him, and with the same numbers, the same Big Build scandal and the same four months to turn it around.
